The HomePod is not all about the sound quality, it depends on Siri more. Any smart speaker is only as good as its digital voice assistant it is running. Most of the HomePod reviews so far have praised the great sound quality of the smart speaker but criticised it voice assistant i.e. Siri for its limited capabilities.

Gene Munster of the Loup Ventures decided to put the Siri on the HomePod to the test to see how food or bad Siri is on Apple’s first smart speaker. Sadly, the results are not very encouraging. While Siri was able to understand 99.4 percent of the questions asked, it could only respond to 52.3 of those queries accurately. In comparison, Alexa responded to 64 percent, Cortana did 57 percent correctly, while the Google Assistant stood at the top by responding to 81 percent of the queries accurately.

Despite its poor results, Siri on HomePod managed to perform pretty well when answering local queries such as where could one find a good cup of coffee and shopping places. While it outperformed both the Cortana and Alexa but was still behind the Google Assistant.

Siri understood 99.4% of queries and answered 52.3% of them correctly. This places HomePod at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of AI assistant performance. Siri is particularly strong in Local (where can I find a good cup of coffee around here?) and Commerce (help me buy some new shoes.) queries, handily beating Alexa and Cortana, but still falling short of Google Home in those areas. Overall, Siri performed above our expectations given the limited scope of HomePod’s music focus.

The main weaknesses of Siri become apparent it is asked questions related to navigation, calendar, calling, and email. Siri does not support these categories altogether. IF we remove these categories from the test, the Siri score would improve to 67 percent putting it at a far better place than Alexa and Cortana. When we include these categories, the Siri falls down to 52.3 percent accuracy. Since all these categories are support by Apple on their iPhone lineup, it is more about the company flipping the switch on them for the smart speaker as well.

The sound quality, however, is fantastic. It “sounds incredible” and far better than all its competitors. Setting up an HomePod is far easier than the rivals and it doe not require one to struggle with the Wi-Fi network. Apple has made HomePod more human-like as it does not repeat your query, unlike Google Assistant and Alexa.

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